Yesterday was a pleasant mix.
In the morning, I had the lovely experience of picking peas. I hadn’t done this yet, but I’d read that fresh peas are one of the finer pleasures lost to our pleasure-obsessed age. Gene Logsden once fretted that for the vast hordes that go through life without once tasting peas right off the plant, and Elliot Coleman says in the Four Season Harvest that his first pea harvest always becomes a meal. With introductions like these, I hesitated to get my hopes up, but I should have let them run their wild course. Fresh peas are a marvel.
There are two varieties on this farm: shell peas, which are the standard “pea” I thought I knew from chilled corpses in frozen food body bags, and sugar snaps, which are eaten pod and all and are sweet as candy. This year, the farmers sowed both with oats. The oats grew tall and straight (right now, they look like an overgrown lawn), and the pea plants, which I’d never seen nor even imagined, entwined delicately around the living trellises.
Rain fell early yesterday morning, so when I got there the whole patch was glistening. Each pod hid in a lush jungle of vines and flowers. When I found a thick, moist sugar snap and bit in, it was rain and sunshine magically made food. That was my morning.
Then there was the afternoon. A neighboring stud pony scented that one of the several mares on this farm was in heat. He broke out of his pen to come see if he could help.
It’s impossible to convey the phenomenon of a three-foot pony wreaking havoc among a herd of six-foot mares. It is entrenched firmly in the category of “boring-in-a-movie-but-thrilling-in-real-life.” Without a lasso and some cowboy experience, it’s not entirely simple to coax a bucking pony away from his romantic pursuits. Nor does it make matters easier when, after you pen him, he discovers with all the ease of a highly-paid efficiency consultant that some of the older fence boards are past their prime. If he does this two or three times, and keeps fighting his way undaunted back to the mares, you have a recipe for a real time-wasting inefficient pain in the neck.
And a highly entertaining afternoon.
